Speaking with Adam Spencer on ABC 702 Breakfast, Lt Col Malcolm McGregor shares the very personal story of how he became Lt Col Catherine 'Cate' McGregor.

"I was troubled about my gender at a young age. I came from a conservative family in a country town, I excelled at sport and was highly motivated to be a soldier," she said to Adam.

The sense of feeling like a woman started at puberty, but was put the side when offered a scholarship to Duntroon at the age of 15.

"I just thought, get on with it, you've got this profound motivation to go off and be an army officer, and I went off and did that fairly exceptionally well. "

First diagnosed as a transsexual by a psychologist in the 1980s, the road to becoming a woman was difficult.

"The way they treated transgender people in that era was pretty brutal, if you were a young gay person, and living perhaps in the transsexual subculture they would transition you without batting an eyelid," he told Adam.

The message was very different for an army man working in a legal office.

"They would say, this isn't for you, you might be in a lot of pain, but you need to get on with your life."

The greatest challenge for McGregor was how to tell his much loved wife.

"I consider her my soul mate, and she I think feels the same," Lt Col McGregor told Adam. "I can say that that was the hardest conversation I've had in my life."

Cate McGregor faced the total collapse of her personal life while writing "An Indian Cricket of Summer" during last summer's Australia versus India test.

"I was at the Adelaide Oval and have a vague recollection of searing heat and that glaring Australian sun and felt almost as though I was disassociated from the whole experience," Cate told Adam.

What does she remember of Malcolm? "The rupture in identity, the rupture of actually crossing that rubicon to become so deeply different, maybe there is a healing balm in the psyche that just allows us to bury the memory."